Panel members:
- Nancy Armstrong
- Ziva Ben-Porat
- Page duBois
- Helder Macedo
- Hugh Ridley
- Maria Irene Ramalho (Coordinator)
Overall Research Unit Quality:
- Excellent
(Others: Very Good; Good; Fair: Poor)
Comments and recommendations regarding the Unit activities, research orientation, organization and application of funds Of all the units visited, this Research Unit caused the best of impressions on the Evaluation Team. Having started off with very modest funding (the rating of approval in 1999 was Fair), in little more than three years time the Center managed to bring its accomplishment to the level of excellence. The Team strongly recommends that the Center be given maximum support. Under the strong and flexible leadership of Professor Helena Buescu, an ambitious, well-qualified team of researchers have worked together creatively to set goals that are not only within their reach but also important outside of Portugal. The research that results, making up an impressive list of publications, is of high quality and sophistication. The Center has a healthy proportion of pre-PhD. Members to established scholars in the field. Graduate students and postdocs are involved in every aspect of center life. It is ti the credit of the senior scholars who train them that the junior researchers are remarkably confident, enterprising, and able to deal with their seniors as with their equals with complete respect and gratitude. The intellectual energy of the center has reproduced its own intellectual ambitions in students who put out their own critical journal and are organizing a conference all on their own. The ingenuity and variety of dissertations on which these students are working is truly remarkable. It augers well for the humanities in Portugal that young intellectuals of this quality will be assuming university positions as the present generation begins to retire.
Most commendably, this is a Center in the true sense of the term, and not a university department in disguise. The activities of its five research lines do form a coherent whole. People from different backgrounds have a clear conceptualisation of their projects, are open to new ideas and possibilities, work together with high synergy, and are in constant dialogue with the most recent developments in the international community. The Evaluation Team has confidence that the Center will continue to pursue its level of excellence by steadily increasing the international visibility of its researchers’ work.
The Center’s proposals for two new projects for programmatic funding command respect and interest, and should be supported. The project on “Dislocating Europe” is truly on the cutting edge. It builds on existing strengths within the center and amalgamates some of the lines already funded. This is precisely the way a center should grow. CECbase, the second project proposed for programmatic funding, aims to compile a comparatist bibliography in Portugal. This is a great research tool, which will reach out beyond the center and involve many Portuguese researchers. It should be adequately funded for the long term. Once CECbase is in existence, it will have to be updated every year.
Report 2006 by the CEC's External Assessors:
REPORT 2006
The external assessors of the CEC met on 20 March 2007 at the Center to discuss the CEC annual report on 2006. Said report had been duly sent a month before the meeting. As had also been good practice in previous years, copies of the Center’s publications had been sent to the members of the advisory board upon publication. At the meeting, the director of the CEC presented a general outline of the Center’s achievements over the last year, detailing scholarly output, the continued development and expansion of the CEC and Trad bases, and participation in national and international academic networks.
Project leaders presented individual reports on their projects’ activities.
We particularly commend the high quality and originality of the publications produced by the Center over the last year. While the established research lines of the CEC continue to prosper, we are particularly impressed by the auspicious start to the two new lines of inquiry: theatre and translation and memory, testimony, and forgetfulness. The first results of these two new lines of inquiry are already showing in the form of ACT 15, following upon the international symposium held in June 2006, the proceedings of which have been accepted for publication by Campo das Letras in Porto, and they are being finalized at the moment of our meeting, and further in ACT 20, scheduled for next year, and organized with international cooperation from Bologna (Italy) and Unicamp (Brazil). Both these lines of research are particularly timely, in that there is considerable international interest in theatre and translation studies, as well as in memory studies, which opens up even further possibilities for yet greater international collaboration.
Once again we notice that the student numbers, at the MA and PhD levels, have increased considerably: at the PhD level there is an increase of 35% on the previous year. Three new members of the Center team obtained their PhDs in 2006. However, in our report for 2005 we noted the need to monitor the increasingly heavy workload of the permanent staff. We note from the report for 2006 an unevenness of distribution in the number of doctoral and masters’ candidates assigned to individual staff members. During our meeting we raised the possibility of co-supervision where appropriate to alleviate this problem.
We congratulate once again the CEC director and her team for the collegial and enabling atmosphere at the Center, that is clearly an enhancement to student research and productivity in general. We note, though, that our recommendations in 2005 that urgent consideration be given to improving accommodation, and that appropriate and sufficient clerical and administrative support be allocated to the Center, do not appear to have been acted upon. The provision of administrative support is particularly important in providing assistance for funding applications. This is even more pressing in 2007, with the expanding opportunities for EU funding that are opening up for the humanities.
During our meeting we discussed future possible developments for the CEC. There is a clear set of aims for 2007 outlined on p. 38 of the 2006 report, and a longer term projection on p. 8. We also discussed the possible collaboration of the CEC with other centers in Portugal. However, we note the necessity of maintaining the clear scientific identity of the Center, ensuring the maintenance of the Center’s quality rating of “excellent”. This means that in opening discussions for future collaboration the Center must ensure that there is no dilution of its standards, and any discussion must be based on a sound academic case.
We recommend that consideration be given to the following:
- that colleagues be encouraged to develop existing and new lines of research
- that the possibility of a more equitable distribution of theses, possibly via co-supervision, be explored
- that enhanced accommodation be seen as a priority
- that appropriate clerical and administrative support be provided
20 March, 2007
Professor Susan Bassnett
Professor Theo D’Haen
Professor João Flor
Professor Aguiar e Silva
CEC's report - 2006 (pdf)
Evaluation